One of the first audits of a decentralized finance project connected with the Polkadot (DOT) blockchain is set to be carried out by blockchain security firm Quantstamp.
The project, Equilibrium, had first announced its plans to develop an interoperable protocol on Polkadot in summer of this year. For its transition to Polkadot, the project has been developing new products for its decentralized, cross-chain money market, such as interoperable stablecoins, a synthetic asset platform, and a decentralized exchange.
Equilibrium has emphasized that Quantstamp's security audit will be much further-reaching than typical audits, which focus on detecting bugs in smart contracts only. This is because Polkadot provides projects like Equilibrium with a modular framework called Polkadot Substrate, which they can use to launch stand-alone, customized blockchains that will later be connected to Polkadot as a Parachain. Rather than auditing smart contracts that run in an isolated environment, then, Quantstamp will need to audit all of Equilibirum's core components.
The scope of Quantstamp's audit will span the code that governs the blockchain's underlying "business-logic on balances, its risk and price modules, and its 'bailout' mechanics," as Equilibrium explains. The project's developers have identified several key customized components and innovations that they believe require particular diligence, for example, the use of electronic signatures for off-chain brokers and claims. Equilibrium has explained the stakes of the audit as follows:
"Quantstamp’s audit is of key importance to ensure the quality of Equilibrium’s performance. The main reason is that you are customizing a blockchain runtime when you are building on Substrate. If a bug affects part of the logic on the Substrate, the blockchain as a whole can come to a standstill."
As previously reported, Quantstamp was the auditor of Binance's first stablecoin, and was proactive in identifying the key issues with the embattled DeFi protocol SushiSwap. In his comments at the Unitize digital conference this summer, Ma emphasized that security remains a crucial challenge that needs to be tackled within the DeFi ecosystem.